[In which I attempt to create a semi-regular review of assorted zines that have crossed my path, of multiple types and disciplines. Here are two.]

At a release party at the City Reliquary, I picked up the first issue of Caroline Paquita’sWomanimalistic. (Also celebrated that day: the latest issue of Slice Harvester,which should be reviewed in the next installment of these.) I’m familiar with Paquita primarily because of her music: she’s presently one-third of the excellent forgetters, and her artwork adorns their recent debut seven-inch.

Paquita’s style here favors ornately drawn and arranged pages featuring both illustrations and test. This issue opens with a long, illustrated meditation on love, and lovers, with text taken from Carson McCullers’s “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.” Later, the work turns more specific — one piece, called “Punk Medical Myths,” leads to a longer section dealing with health and wellness issues, and the issue closes out with an account of Paquita’s experience of becoming a beekeeper.

A few months ago, the author behind Pins & Needlescontacted me. He’d read the zine I edited a decade or so ago (1996 to 2002, more or less), and wanted to send me a copy of his own. “Absolutely,” I said. And so: the first issue of Pins & Needles, subtitled “Collected Ramblings and Such.” It’s a half-sized zine, focusing mainly on daily observations — the sort of thing that one could find at many a distro table at hall shows in the mid-90s, but that you don’t see quite as much any more.

What struck me primarily about this issue was how much it felt like a sequel to those half-sized zines of yore. Its author is married and works a steady job, but 90s hardcore remains a constant presence in his life — the question of how to apply that sort of ethos to one’s life a decade or more after being exposed to it is a worthwhile one. And that gulf provides the cue for some solid observations, including one on how the list of influences on a Myspace page is the successor to the “ex-members of” that used to fit neatly beneath the names of bands on punk show flyers.

Starring super-notorious musclebound punk/metaldudes Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins (with a little help from super-notorious soft-rockdudes Hall and Oates) Henry & Glenn Forever is a love story to end all love stories!

The zine that spawned the record label: Touch and Go fanzine will get it’s due this summer as Bazillion Points Books will publish a pretty wonderful looking anthology that features hardcore gods like Minor Threat, Negative Approach, Black Flag, Poison Idea, and many others.

Touch and Go fanzine was the brainchild of Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson and was launched in Lansing, Michigan in 1979. Major fanatics of the new punk happenings in the late ’70s, TV and DS set out to chronicle, lambaste, ridicule, and heap praise on all they arbitrarily loved or hated in the music communities in the US and abroad.